How's this for a challenge? Write a novel about virtual-reality gaming and high-school teaching, and make it a story that adults and kids will find hard to put down. In her new novel, Allegra Goodman creates suspense where you might least expect to find it ... Goodman, as deft a plot engineer as any game designer, makes sure her characters don’t stay trapped behind closed doors. She gives them unusual love travails to navigate. The other troubles they stumble into at home, school, and work also test them in ingenious ways. Goodman, like the best teachers, is intent on watching obsessive fantasies turn into imaginative determination. Readers will be too, pulled along by her protagonists’ quests, which are not to follow rules or slay dragons. The real goal is to face complicated selves.

Goodman, whose fiction often channels Jane Austen's smart, socially astute sense and sensibility, goes a bit mushy over this couple's initial attraction ... As always, Goodman has done her homework and gets a lot right, including enjoyably sharp dialogue and convincing portraits of multiple mindsets and terrains ... Readers who share this view will wish that fewer mind-numbing pages were devoted to gaming — though one can't help but marvel at how Goodman has captured the atmosphere of this virtual fantasy land so effectively in words. To her credit, although her bias clearly lies with literature and real relationships over virtual ones, she conveys some of the technical brilliance, creativity, and, yes, fun of video gaming ... Although the love story driving its plot feels formulaic and the portrait of Arcadia Corporation as Evil Empire is rather black and white, Goodman happily makes room on her novel's pedagogic blackboard for imagination, fantasy, and self-expression — whether visual or verbal — and the importance of forging meaningful relationships that are far more substantial than aeroflakes or chalk dust.

The Chalk Artist offers antidotes to this apparent technological scourge. Nina and Collin enjoy a highly symbolic stroll in Walden Woods and Nina’s classroom efforts go toward awakening her students to the glories of Emily Dickinson. But though there’s undeniable charm in Ms. Goodman’s celebration of nature and poetry, the novel’s moral binary feels superficial. Characterizing video games as little more than digital opiates leaves Aidan’s coming-of-age story frustratingly underdeveloped ... The immersive, collaborative worlds of his role-playing games, with their elements of questing, violence and sexual ideation, form a powerful backdrop to the shocks of adolescence. A novel that appreciated the complexity of these games would tell a darker but more truthful story about growing up in contemporary America. Instead, Ms. Goodman has written a feel-good fantasy about kicking a bad habit with help from the Belle of Amherst.

The virtual world Goodman conjures is as feverishly vivid as it is mysterious and alluring. Not since I pushed my way through C. S. Lewis’s fusty mothballed wardrobe and stepped out into the frozen, pine-scented forests of Narnia can I remember being so effectively transported into a viscerally, sometimes terrifyingly plausible alternate universe ... If all of this sounds a little hectic, that’s because it is. Despite its likable energy, Goodman’s novel does sometimes seem to be falling prey to the manic, scrabbled intensity of the games it describes. Now and then, I wondered if that was her intention, but if so it makes a tough demand on the reader. Both plot and structure suffer from a crucial lack of balance as some scenes are played out at needless length while others are only glancingly sketched ... Nina’s quest to get her kids to feel poetry 'from the inside' does now and then smack of didacticism and self-indulgence, but there’s no doubting Goodman’s ability to make her readers feel things that way. This is a novel full of wit and spark; I found it oddly irresistible and arresting, despite my cavils.

Goodman’s skill at portraying the roller-coaster of youthful romanticism, lust, boredom, and paralyzing insecurity is matched by her nimble evocation of place in both Massachusetts and Arkadia ... Goodman’s mastery of the technological creation and emotional experience of these virtual spheres is impressive. The Arkadian scenes are both captivating and chilling. However, the black hat/white hat dichotomy is a little strained ... Although The Chalk Artist ends in a warm house, fragrant with gingerbread and echoing with friendly conversation, the seductive journey through Arkadia has taught everyone that nothing is forever.

Goodman takes her time rendering this richly imagined alternative universe, so that we might better understand why, for Aidan, his 'ordinary body seemed a dim reflection of his gaming self' ... The weakest sections of this novel involve Collin’s romance with Nina, which is never quite believable and for which some of the dialogue is remarkably stilted, coming from such an experienced novelist. Conversely, Aidan and his twin sister nearly always ring true, whether the topic is their fractious entanglement as twins, their loneliness as teens or the corresponding yearning they share for love and connection.

How The Chalk Artist’s characters make sense of their shifting worlds is at the center of Goodman’s tale, as each person uncomfortably bumps into his or her opposite. There’s the mother who fears for her son’s future as a gaming addict, and the mother who is cautiously optimistic that her son has found an outlet for his creative talents that includes a 401(k) plan … In the end, The Chalk Artist feels not entirely concluded, but more like a midpoint in a collection of ongoing narratives. Despite the threads left dangling, Goodman provides two of her characters with the sense that being acknowledged, heard, encouraged, and appreciated is the best prize of all, for both the giver and the recipient.

The language and details of the games—sparkling aeroflakes, epic qwests, diamond flasks 'filled with a hatchling dragon’s blood'—are the strongest and most original elements of the book: in fact, nongaming readers may be surprised to find themselves wondering if they are missing out on something. On the other hand, some of the plot developments relating to Aidan feel forced, and his twin almost seems to be living in a different novel with her weight problems and sexuality issues. A very relevant love story with strong crossover possibilities for teen readers.

...[an] intricate and empathic novel ... Exploring not only the varying ephemerality and permanence of both art and relationships, this richly textured novel also considers the commodification of art and art as a means to salvation. With its strong Boston setting, the novel also offers opportunities to consider the contrasts between local and virtual communities and the authenticity of the relationships each fosters.